Dear Friends

R Morris Levine and Yongyu Chen

In Friendship as a Way of Life, we studied, through Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert, Sophie Calle, Fleur Jaeggy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ross Laycock, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Roland Barthes, Larry Mitchell, and Maurice Blanchot, friendships, especially queer friendships, across the twentieth-century. Our cast exchanged letters—between 1948 and 1961, Bachmann and Celan corresponded some two-hundred times (included below); traded poems—Laycock, soon after his HIV diagnosis, gifted Gonzalez-Torres a collection of Wallace Stevens, in which was earmarked “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”; penned poems for one another—Rilke about Becker, or Adrienne Rich as Becker to Westhoff; conjured friends to come—as in the speculative queer commune of Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions (also included herein); and memorialized those past—Wojnarowicz recounting his final days with Hujar, Calle detailing her brief encounter with a stranger in a carriage aboard the Trans-Siberian railroad, Blanchot in memoriam of Georges Bataille. These friendships were documented in writing, yes. They were also enacted in writing. Made through, summoned as writing. 

Dear Friends gathers letters, poems, obituaries, manifestos, essays, and novels that do friendship. Some of these books we read together, others we cited in passing or didn’t have time to broach, and yet others we didn’t know about.

— R Morris Levine and Yongyu Chen

I'm Very into You: Correspondence 1995-1996
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark
M.I.T Press, 2015

Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan
Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, trans. Wieland Hoban
Seagull Books, 2010

Hypnos
René Char, trans. Mark Hutchinson
Seagull Books, 2014

In the Presence of Absence 
Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Sinan Antoon
Archipelago Books, 2011
Suggested by Mounir, Friendship as a Way of Life Workshop Participant 

Moyra Davey: Burn the Diaries
Moyra Davey 
Dancing Foxes Press, 2014

The Work of Mourning
Jacques Derrida, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
University of Chicgao Press, 2003

To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
Hervé Guibert 
Semiotext(e), 2020

Homie
Danez Smith 
Graywolf Press, 2020

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
Larry Mitchell, illustrated by Ned Asta
Nightboat Books, 2019
Suggested by Jess, Friendship as a Way of Life Workshop Participant 

The Girl Without Arms 
Brandon Shimoda
Black Ocean, 2011

Debts & Lessons
Lynn Xu
Omnidawn, 2013